Exit Wounds

Award-winning writer Peter Godwin's memoir, focusing on middle age and his changing relationships with the three women who shaped his life.

'Masterful' DAVE EGGERS

'Unforgettable' MAGGIE SMITH

'Profound' CLAIRE MESSUD

'Will leave you breathless' AMINATTA FORMA

When she turned ninety, my mother sprang a final surprise on us. She started speaking in the voice of a stranger.

Peter's mother is dying. Born in England, and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a hospital bed in the partitioned living room of his sister's London house, her accent having overnight become posher than the Queen's.Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, a longing that does not diminish as he reflects on being a conscript in the Rhodesian army in the 1970s, writing about conflicts across the African continent and beyond or settling in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children.

In his mother's final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was – and wasn't: the secrets they kept from one another, the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them and the beauty of the wildly different places they called home.In Exit Wounds, Peter Godwin considers the life of émigrés, exiles and refugees, and grieves the many losses that make life both magnificent and unbearable. With generations of history behind him, he brings us into the spaces which make us question, suffer and celebrate the lives we have among family and friends, and the healing of our own scars.

About the Author

Peter Godwin was born and raised in Zimbabwe. He is the author of six non-fiction books including Mukiwa, which received the George Orwell Prize and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstones award, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, which won the Borders Original Voices Award.

His book The Fear was selected by the New Yorker as a best book of the year. He has taught writing at Wesleyan and Columbia, and served as President of the PEN American Center. He is an Orwell fellow and a Guggenheim fellow. He lives in New York City.